Festive Stamp Gift Tags & Merry Christmas

As has become blatantly clear over the course of the past few months of blogging, I have a lot of stamps. A lot of stamps I don't even know what to do with. And I don't like chucking things out. But I do like re-using things. Given that postage stamps are little mini pieces of lovely design, it makes sense to use them.

Lots of people who otherwise might not post things, tend to post things at Christmas. Therefore there is an abundance of Christmas stamps. I keep them all separately, and I have found the perfect use for them - as Christmas gift tags.

I had a little 'crafternoon' the other weekend and sat down in the sun and made some tags to go on all the pressies that I was yet to buy.. although I still had plenty of things to do pre-Christmas, making gift tags is way more relaxing and fun than heading out into the madness of shopping centres, so that is what I chose to do.

These are all the supplies I used

I meant to post this little craft project last week, but now it is so close to Christmas it is probably too late for people. But, as you are sorting through the post-Christmas debris, you may wish to set aside your Christmas stamps for next year. I keep my Christmas stamps sorted in little black album cards.

For the gift tages I used coloured paper and washi tape to give colour to the tags, and then used the stamp to decorate. (And here is a tip: packaging tags from the newsagent are far cheaper than tags from a craft supply store.)



Choosing the right stamp to go on a tag

The finished product

So now it is Christmas eve and it is now time for me to go and use these tags and wrap up my presents that will be sitting under the Christmas tree tomorrow.

I don't think the USA stamp is necessarily a Christmas stamp.. but it works! 

This is a bit of an unusual Sunday Stamps edition... apart from the fact it is now Monday here in Australia, but I thought this was a nice way of sharing some of my old Christmas stamps. And I have previously shared what I think about this year's Christmas stamps here, which you can check out if you haven't already.

And with that I would like to wish everyone: Sunday stampers, friends, readers, passers-by, bloggers, and everybody else who has kindly supported this blog this year, a very Merry Christmas and a safe and happy festive season.

For other festive Christmas Stamps, check out other blogs through the Sunday Stamps link above.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Flags: Sunday Stamps

Wow! Due to the general business of life it has been more than two weeks without blogging - in fact I haven't blogged at all this month - and I am seriously suffering withdrawal symptoms!! (One of the symptoms included rocking up to small soiree with a bottle of wine in one hand, and my stamps in the other - and a polite request to use the host's scanner before the other guests arrived. Thanks Ben!)

Anyhow, needless to say I am very excited about participating in this week's Sunday Stamps. The theme is national flags; inspired partly by the fact that it was Bastille Day during the week. And within my collection, I found the perfect stamp for the theme, which has the French flag behind three figures of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and commemorates the French Revolution, but is in fact an issue from the USA:

It is hard to tell from the scan of course, but part of the appeal of this stamp is its size - it is about double the size of a standard stamp. A nice stamp, yes?

Of course, there are plenty of stamps featuring the Australian flag in my collection, so I thought I better share one of them too. I like this one because it has a bit of a tech-y computer-chip thing going on, to make it more interesting.

The Australian flag features the Union Jack, the seven pointed star representing the Commonwealth, and the southern cross.

I also started pondering alternative Australian flags, and hoped that I would be able to share a stamp featuring the Aboriginal flag - but alas, there doesn't seem to be one in existence. This is a bit sad, in my view. I think Australia Post should rectify that, quick stat.

The other alternative flag I thought about was the Eureka flag. The Eureka Flag, which pre-dates our national flag, also features the southern cross, and was born out of a miners strike on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854. The flag is now used by the Workers Union movement. The Eureka flag has been chosen by Australia Post to feature on a stamp, and I have a mint pair. I really like that the image features a rippled fabric effect.

Peter Lalor, the rebel leader at the Eureka Stockade, standing beneath the Eureka flag, swore the first oath to a non-British flag on Australian soil. He said:

"We swear by the southern cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties."

The gold diggers at Ballarat were fighting their own revolution against an unjust licensing system and a corrupt administration. And in a way, Lalor's oath ties in nicely with the mantra of the French Revolution, taking us back to our starting point: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Thanks for joining me once again for Sunday Stamps, please click on the link to find out what other bloggers have been pondering in relation to flags and stamps.

Plura Scriptum Epistola

Hello Friends!
I am feeling the love at the moment, or more precisely my mailbox is feeling the love, and I just wanted to say thank-you to all the wonderful people who have sent me mail lately.

Postcard from Rohan, my semi-retired jungle-explorer friend (for real!)

This blog is not really supposed to be about the mail I receive, but the thing of it is, stamps and mail go hand in hand.

I love stamps, and I love post. Part of what makes stamps so special though, is that they adorn envelopes, which in turn promise to hold gems of  correspondence. Hand-written personal notes. Ah, the warm and fuzzy feelings I get when I receive hand-written personal notes in my mailbox!

And I certainly felt very warm and fuzzy the other night, when I went to my special "I heart post" post box and found the following amazing card waiting for me, from Carla at 365 Letters; not least of all because this was my first piece of post directly from the blogosphere.

There are so many things that I love about the card, that I feel it warrants a list:

1) Check out the awesome vintage-ness of the colours, the rounded corners and the image. BRILLIANT.

2) This came from Carla's holiday in June 1980... and she labellled the back of the card with that information when she bought it. Swoon. I love a bit of historical record-keeping.

3) THE STAMPS ARE AMAZING (and worthy of an exclamation in capitals). Click on the image above to check them out properly. They are worth it.

4) Did I mention it was the first piece of mail from a random fellow blogger?? 

Yep, I am feeling all warm and fuzzy just looking over it again. Thank-you Carla, you made my day (slash week)!

My parents are travelling at the moment, and they sent me the above lovely postcard from Austria featuring a Gustav Klimt painting... and the Wiener Werkstätte logo on the reverse, with a very nice stamp indeed. And they also sent me a Swedish map postcard. Thank-you parents! Three of my favourite things!

The thing is, with this blog, I have been thinking alot about why I like post so much. The correspondence part is definitely an element. And with that in mind, I recently joined the Letter Writers Alliance, because, I feel like with all this banging on about post that I do, I really should be sending some!

 

And my membership card arrived in the mail last week... and the envelope was enough to make me happy (I am a girl of simple pleasures, it is true).

I can tell you that I do plan on using my "Letter Writers Alliance" membership/superpower for good and not evil. And they have a Latin motto: Plura Scriptum Epistola. I did a Latin major at university, and the only thing I really remember is "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus". Yep. That is the Hogwarts motto. Never disturb a sleeping dragon. In muggle idiom that would be, "let sleeping dogs lie".

Anyhow, I am all for Latin mottos, and I am very happy to be part of an organisation that has one. So, Plura Scriptum Epistola. I am going to take this on as a personal motto forthwith; and I shall, I shall, write more letters. They probably won't be in Latin.

Thankyou Laura!

Thankyou Sandra - a postcard AND stamps. Yippee!

Oh yes, my friends do know that I love a bit of royal kitsch!

Thankyou Sandy

Thankyou to all the lovely people that have sent me things in the post recently. I do so love post. xx

And last but not least, just in, vintage-post Post from Jaz!  Yay!

Post from and for Grandpa Jeff: Sunday Stamps.

This week Viridian at Sunday Stamps has chosen my all-time-number-one-favourite theme to feature for the week: Maps on Stamps. Given that the theme was my suggestion, I simply had to participate. But I haven't been near a scanner, and have had other things on my mind - so please forgive me if the photos are not quite up to scratch.

I have explained why I love maps on stamps in a previous blog entry, and have also included some lovely Norfolk Island map stamps on Sunday Stamps once before. In thinking about which map stamps I would share this week, the choice was blatantly obvious: it had to be the above two wonderful First Day Covers from my Grandpa Jeff.

This blog of mine is all about my stamp collection. But sometimes, as with all collections, it is not just the stamp itself that it is the important thing, but the origin of the stamp: how it came to be in my collection.
I collect maps on stamps because I love the aesthetic of map design, but also the intellectual side of thinking about how a physical reality of landscape or space is being conveyed in an image.
That is one aspect of these First Day Covers. They are exquisite in design and historically interesting.

However, the most important aspect of these First Day Covers, for me, is that they are from my wonderful Grandpa. He gave them to me about four weeks ago.  The postmark on the 'First Day Northwest Territory' Cover is July 18 1937. Grandpa would have been nearly 9 years old, so I guess they were originally collected by his father, Pa Bert.

This FDC is in memory of Virginia Dare in 1587, issued in 1937. The stamp features the baby and her parents, but the FDC design features a lovely map showing Roanoke Island. (Click to Enlarge).

FDC  comemmorating First Day Northwest Territory 1787(Click image to enlarge)

Grandpa passed away during the week, and I already miss him terribly. Small little things mean a great deal sometimes, and now these First Day Covers mean even more to me. Thankyou Grandpa Jeff, not just for the Covers, but for everything. Absolutely everything.

This has been an entry for Sunday Stamps. To check out other wonderful map stamps, and what other bloggers have to share on the theme, you can click on the button below:

RIP Jeffrey Desmond Kiddell. I love you to bits.